“Embracing the Journey” has all the earmarks of being a stealth gay/transgender front organization, and an exemplar of deception, doublespeak, and egregious proof-texting. There is a reason why they avoid direct statements about their view that Scripture isn’t addressing committed homosexual relationships and an “authentic” transgender life: They want to attract conservative parents who start with a position akin to that of Jesus and Scripture, and then convince them to abandon the tension of truth-in-love in favor of a distorted view of love.

“Embracing the Journey: A Christian Parents’ Blueprint to Loving Your LGBTQ Child” by Greg and Lynn McDonald

I’m starting to read Embracing the Journey: A Christian Parents’ Blueprint to Loving Your LGBTQ Child* by Greg and Lynn McDonald. As I noted in a prior post, their organization by the same name is putting on a conference at Andy Stanley’s church in September, and has a “chapter” at Saddleback Church (Rick Warren’s old church).

It has all the earmarks of being a stealth gay/transgender front organization, and an exemplar of deception, doublespeak, and egregious proof-texting. There is a reason why they avoid direct statements about their view that Scripture isn’t addressing committed homosexual relationships and an “authentic” transgender life: They want to attract conservative parents who start with a position akin to that of Jesus and Scripture, and then convince them to abandon the tension of truth-in-love in favor of a distorted view of love.

Remember to compare whatever someone claims with respect to treating someone engaged in homosexual activity to how one should respond to someone engaged in adult-committed incest, then polyamory.

The McDonalds say in their book that they don’t “tackle many hot topics” in their book like what the Bible says about homosexual practice (though they have their own opinion), because “thriving isn’t about being right.” “There was a time, not so long ago, when the world seemed black and white to us … ‘right’ or ‘wrong'” (207; RG: like their stance on incest and polyamory?).

They were “released … from the idea that everything is either/or” when a pastor told them that between God’s creation of day and night are “gray periods” of dusk and dawn; between the land and sea God created are the unmentioned “streams, lakes, and rivers” which are not “less biblical than the oceans.” In other words, embrace the shades of gray entailed in “LGBTQ” propaganda. While you are at it, embrace the shades of gray involving idolatry and other forms of sexual immorality.

They do recommend that if the reader wants more “guidance about issues related to the LGBTQ community” they can go to “the resources list on our website,” where incidentally they will find no books that make the biblical case for a male-female requirement for sexual relationships. They will find plenty of “resources” that promote committed homosexual relationships, like books by Justin Lee, Matthew Vines, David Gushee, Kathy Baldock, Debbie Causey, John Pavlovitz, and Andrew Marin. You certainly won’t find any of my work recommended there, or even the diluted work of Preston Sprinkle.

The McDonalds assure their readers: Just “love God, and love another. We leave the rest to the Holy Spirit.” What do you mean? You leave incest, polyamory, and idolatry to the Holy Spirit and don’t concern yourselves with whether these things are right or wrong? Applied to other areas where Scripture is clear (and the scriptural position on a male-female prerequisite for sexual relations is the clearest of all sexual-ethic concerns in the Bible) it would mean abandoning biblical clarity and drifting towards acceptance and promotion.

They address the issue of thriving, where they simply assume without any biblical basis whatsoever that thriving never involves exhorting people to depart from a life of sin, in short, to repent; even though this is a staple of the preaching and teaching of Jesus, Paul, and all NT writers. There is a reason why Mark summarizes Jesus’ entire message as “The Kingdom of God has come near: Repent and believe in the gospel” (1:15). True love always entails a call to repentance, with warnings, when a person holds beliefs or engages in behavior that could lead to their exclusion from God’s kingdom.

Yet for the McDonalds thriving involves “losing a lot of our old ideas about religion,” when you stop feeling a need to talk about someone else’s sin (because that would make you better than someone else, which is wrong), giving up the need to fix others, avoiding those who “will choose judgment” and “reject your efforts to love” (210-12).

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